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June 2012 Newsletter

I have the distinct honor this month of officially introducing a couple of new features designed specifically to assist you in receiving support in a more efficient and secure manner. We have been testing these for quite some time and are very pleased with the results. Allow me to introduce you to our new Chat Verification System and Ticket Submission Form.

Chat Verification System:

If we’ve had the pleasure of assisting you in LiveChat recently, it is likely that you’ve noticed a few changes therein. One of which is a Chat Verification System, designed for you to conveniently and securely verify yourself as the account owner.

Account verification has always been taken very seriously by us, but has unfortunately often been experienced as an inconvenience by our Customers. There is now a small button at the lower right-hand corner of the chat window that says “Verify Acct.” You may click this at any time in order to automatically provide your billing account credentials and thus verify yourself as the account owner. Conversely, if the chat conversation reaches a point such that account verification is required in order to continue, the Jr. Administrator handling the chat has a similar button on their end which will then request you provide verification credentials in order to continue with the chat.

Moving forward, we will be expanding this to include additional forms of verification as well. As it stands, approximately 25% of chats are auto-verifying via this utility, resulting in overall shorter chat times and increased security. As we expand the functionality of this tool, we look forward to serving you faster and more securely than ever before.

Ticket Submission Form:

Earlier this month, we silently launched our new support ticket submission form; visible by clicking on “Create a Ticket” at http://support.hostgator.com. This form is designed not only for ease of use, but also to greatly reduce the amount of time involved in resolving any given issue. Traditionally, if you emailed us directly for support and neglected to provide account verification information, then we often had no choice but to reply back requesting said information. This extra step, though absolutely necessary, could add hours onto the total resolution time for any given issue. The new form takes care of this vital step right up front, ensuring that each request for support that we receive does come from the actual owner of the specified account.

Another great thing about the form is that it ensures each request lands in the correct queue from the outset. In the past, if you happened to email support@hostgator.com with a request to migrate your data to another hosting plan, that ticket would wait in the support queue and then when it reaches a Support Admin, that Admin would have to change the queue of the ticket over to Migrations where the ticket would then await a Migrations Admin to work on it. Now, this form ensures not only that the request is verified, but also that it appears in the absolute correct queue. These two improvements, combined, will drastically improve our response time to your support requests.

Since the form launched, around 9am CST on Friday, June 9th we have received 1,696 tickets. Of those, 1,589 were already verified before hitting the queue. That’s almost 1,600 requests within just nine days that didn’t require any additional time or responses due to lack of verification. In other words, 93% of the requests we received for support this week were pre-verified and in the correct queues. Clearly, this form is going to streamline our ability to assist you more efficiently.

We hope you enjoy these new features and find them as fundamentally use-able as they were designed to be. If you experience any troubles with these, or anything pertaining to your HostGator account, you can always email feedback@hostgator.com and we will be happy to assist you.

Why does Hostgator not spend time and money on finding ways to eliminate the need for some support. For instance, if there are XXX calls about configuring a product, then make it easier to configure!.Bragging about your support stats seems silly, I think it better to make things intuitive enough for a novice to do.
Thats just a competitors point of view!

HostGator

18 June 2012 at
1:29 pm

I’d like to think we’re reporting stats moreso than bragging about them. We are in a constant state of refining and optimizing, if there’s any product of ours you are having issues configuring, we’re happy to assist; please let us know!

HostGator

18 June 2012 at
1:31 pm

Good lookin’ out, Chimpie! I’m working on getting that fixed now. Thanks!

3dmachinery

18 June 2012 at
3:24 pm

Thank you guys I think it makes a lot more easier to verify themselves for those who learnt english as a foreign language. Because there were necessary but not too easy quetions from the support team for it.

Andy Moore

18 June 2012 at
4:02 pm

Hi,
May I first say what a great job you guys do 24/7 and for that I thank you. Your service in my experience has been extremely good and that’s why I use you.
However, (there’s always a BUT…) would you kindly answer me this question.
I have clients that are based in Europe who have experienced problems when trying to either open accounts with you and Hgator not accepting their CC’s. And/or there seems to be a slight reluctance on your part to deal with websites that are not in English.
For instance, I recently sold Hgator to a man in Germany and his site was in German. Now this may not be your fault, but after several chats it was clear that you suddenly just kind of chucked him and his site away without showing any interest in what we could do to clear up the problem with bringing it over to Hgator.
The man in question has now abandoned his German site and has since bought other domains to continue his business.
Could you elaborate on this please?
Thanks again for all your help.
Andy moore

HostGator

18 June 2012 at
5:01 pm

Andy, I’m happy to work with you on this, though I can assure you we never chuck any Customers aside; we literally support everyone from around the globe, in any language that Google translate can assist us with, to the best of our ability. I’m not sure we can discuss this appropriately in a public forum. Please email me at feedback@hostgator.com ATTN: Blog and I’d be happy to get to the bottom of this. If you happen to have any related ChatIDs or ticket number that I can use to properly research the circumstance you mentioned, please include those.

anilagarwal

19 June 2012 at
12:30 am

I hope these things will be mutually beneficial. We as Hostgator client will get solutions for our problems at a faster pace.

Mike Becvar

21 June 2012 at
12:22 pm

I ran into an issue a few weeks ago where I had to verify my account ownership during a help chat. I was in a catch 22 situation. I wasn’t at home and didn’t know my account information.

My website was down and I really needed to get it up and running ASAP. My account had been suspended because the auto bill payment for my account had failed. A week or two before the payment was due, my credit card company had detected fraudulent activity on my credit card (not related to Host Gator) and issued me a new credit card. I had stopped checking the Verizon account associated with my hosting account, so I never got the notice that the payment was past due. I wasn’t sure how to remotely check my Verizon email account to recover my lost password. I had to take care of that before I could continue the conversation. I don’t know why you never tried to send me a bill in the mail or contact me another way, but that is beside the point. Working with the guy at the help desk was like running in circles as I had no easy way to get to my account to continue our conversation. You really need to provide a backup method to verify account ownership.

Fortunately, I was eventually able to get into my account, update my credit card, reactivate my account, and change my email address to one that I still use on a regular basis.

HostGator

21 June 2012 at
3:43 pm

There are certainly multiple means of verification, you may always request additional methods to verify your account up to and including reaching out to a Supervisor for assistance. Please keep that in mind should this circumstance occur again, additionally please accept my apology for the inconvenience that you experienced.

Phyllis Breech

27 June 2012 at
9:59 am

I have been a hostgator customer now for more that 5 years. I have found your service and support to be excellent. I am exciting about the new improvements.